George Santayana Quotes

343 Sourced Quotes

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

George Santayana
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

George Santayana
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.

George Santayana
A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

George Santayana
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

George Santayana
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.

George Santayana
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

George Santayana
.. until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

George Santayana
Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colour'd taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

George Santayana
What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?

George Santayana
We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.

George Santayana
A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

George Santayana
The essence of nowness runs like a fire along the fuse of time.

George Santayana